The Charitable IRA has been a popular, albeit elusive planning tool. Nothing has changed currently. The option has still not been renewed by the IRS and uncertainty remains as to whether it will be. This makes planning a real challenge. Richard Fox offers cautionary...

Writing on behalf of the American Council on Gift Annuities, Conrad Teitell asks the Senate Finance Committee to make the expired charitable IRA provision permanent and to expand it to include rollovers for life-income charitable gifts.

The IRS has clarified that "required minimum distributions from an IRA taken by a taxpayer during 2010 cannot be rolled over to an IRA." This position prevents taxpayers who want to return RMDs they took from their IRAs during 2010 and then redirect them to...

As reported by Tom Herman of the Wall Street Journal, Congress is moving closer to extending the life of a popular law that has encouraged many older investors to donate to charity from their Individual Retirement Accounts.

Writing for The Chronicle on Philanthropy, Holly Hall reports, "Fund raisers who solicit large gifts need to become knowledgeable about the charitable aspects of a law that allows people to covert their regular individual retirement accounts into Roth IRAs this...

It just got more dangerous to use income in respect of a decedent for charitable bequests. In this article from the January 2009 issue of Trusts & Estates magazine, UMKC law professor Christopher Hoyt examines how a recent IRS Chief Counsel Memorandum and...

Can an IRA be used to help indirectly finance life insurance owned by a charity? In this article, Steve Leimberg reviews and comments on recently published Ltr. Rul. 200741016 in which the Service concluded the arrangement is not a prohibited investment in insurance...

According to the National Committee on Planned Giving, the latest results collected from the NCPG IRA Gifts Survey have reached the $100 million mark. More precisely, the latest survey results show 5,814 individual distributions with a total value of more than $102...

According to an article published by InvestmentNews.com, IRA investors have taken advantage of provisions contained in the Pension Protection Act of 2006 to donate at least $75 million to charity. In an interview with the National Committee on Planned Giving, "The...

In a legal memorandum published earlier this week, the IRS concluded that a partial transfer of a decedent's IRA to charities in satisfaction of a pecuniary bequest via the decedent's trust results in gross income to the estate and fails to qualify for an offsetting...

On Thursday, August 17th, President Bush is scheduled to sign the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that includes a long-awaited provision that will permit taxpayers to make direct charitable transfers from their Individual Retirement Accounts. In this article, PGDC...

With respect to 401(k) plans, only a surviving spouse can roll such amounts over into an IRA upon the death of the plan participant; otherwise, most companies require such amounts to be distributed within one year of death resulting in immediate income tax. In this...

Following publication of our follow-up article by Chris Hoyt on indirect IRA rollovers last week, PGDC member Bruce Kinsella posted the following comment: "Could you please illustrate an example of a donor cashing in stock, paying the long term gains, and gifting the...

Last week 1,300 gift planners convened in Orlando for the 18th National Conference on Planned Giving. And as suspected, the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005 and its implications on "indirect" IRA rollovers was a hot topic. In this follow-up to last week's...

Those following the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005 were disappointed to learn that a provision that would have allowed direct tax-free rollovers of IRA assets to charity failed to make it into the final bill. However, the planned giving community has been...

A potentially useful lifetime charitable giving technique for donors who own appreciated employer stock in a qualified retirement plan is described in this article by Dan Rice. As the article explains, the technique involves obtaining favorable tax results for the...